Night, when it came, was a revelation. Not the gentle dimming of a normal evening, but a sudden, profound plunge into darkness.
No streetlights.
No comforting spill of light from neighbours’ windows painting familiar patterns on my room’s walls.
It was as if the entire city had been dipped in black ink, applied with bold, deliberate strokes.
When the night breeze moved through the garden, the trees became shifting, formless shadows, hulking creatures in the periphery.
We kept our lights off, navigating by the dim grey rectangles of the windows, each step careful, a house full of silent figures moving just enough to find our way from one room to the next.
Twenty years of living with the background hum of conflict, of news alerts that became almost mundane, had perhaps built a kind of insulation.
That, and a quiet, deeply seated belief: death arrives when it’s written.
No more, no less.
If today was the day, no amount of fear could alter the script.
So, an odd sort of normalcy persisted within me for a while, even as the outside world tilted on its axis.
I moved through the rooms, the air still, the children quiet, a strange pocket of calm.
It’s incredible what we can get use to once living with it.